


Second Verse

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2011 [5]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Fluff, Humor, M/M, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-29
Updated: 2011-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-28 10:41:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/307016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the second verse is the same as the first. Sometimes it isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Verse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disprove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disprove/gifts).



> **Prompt/Prompter:** X-Men First Class, Erik/Charles, _“I like to see people reunited, maybe that's a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.” ― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_ , non-powered AU - for disprove
> 
> I gave myself cavities writing this, so consider yourself warned. I hope you enjoy.

+

It’s a party like two dozen others a year and Erik finds himself standing in the corner, curling his lip in distaste. Mingling, Emma keeps telling him. Making contacts. Good for business.

He’d rather be anywhere but here with anyone but these stuck up, rich, old farts. But one does not tell Emma Frost no. Especially not when it comes to business and really, Erik wouldn’t know where to hide her body, so he just digs in his heels but lets himself be dragged.

He sighs into his glass, takes a long sip and imagines a bomb dropping on the opulent ballroom and freeing him from his misery. It doesn’t happen. Instead the devil herself comes swaying toward him, dragging a familiar figure after her with an iron grip on his arm.

Erik swallows and takes a deep breath. He could run. He should run. But he owes Charles a lot more than he can ever repay, so he doesn’t. Instead he stands deathly still as Emma comes to a halt in front of him, reels Charles into her side and says, “Look, darling, what I’ve found.”

She looks between them and Erik wants to cringe away from the expression on Charles’s face, half pleased, half terrified. Erik probably doesn’t look much better himself because Emma huffs, flips her hair over her shoulder and points toward a door a few feet away. “Get out of here. Fix it. All that drama is giving me wrinkles; this has been going on for years, good Lord.”

Then she pecks them both on the cheek, swats Charles’s ass in passing just because she can and sashays away again like she didn’t just bring the world crashing down around Erik’s ears. That’s Emma in a nutshell for you.

Charles smiles at him, hesitantly, and Erik finds himself spinning on his heel, stalking toward the indicated door. For one terrifying, long moment, there is nothing. Then he feels Charles move behind him like he used to, forever ago. Has it really been seven years? Have they really managed to avoid each other that long?

He distracts himself with calculating dates and numbers he knows by heart. First he blew out of town, then Charles did his postgraduate in Oxford. Neither of them has been back in the city for much longer than a year. And it’s a big city.

He’s run the numbers a hundred times, calculated all the ways they could have run into each other. Wondered if Charles fled America for the same reason Erik fled New York.

Memories.

He likes to think Charles is not as pathetic as him and never has been.

The door leads to a small sitting room, tastefully decorated and utterly uncomfortable. There is a key in the lock and Erik turns it as soon as Charles has entered the room, because he’d rather have no witnesses for this. He’d prefer not to witness this _himself_ , actually, but that one’s not going to work out. He wouldn’t put it past Emma to lurk around outside the door, ready to kick him where it hurts and shove him back into the room if he tries to flee now.

He motions for Charles to sit. Charles shakes his head, smiles at him, tentatively. “So,” he starts, hands in his pockets, atrocious tie over his pristine shirt, under a tailored waistcoat, like a memory come to life, “I hear you work with Emma now?”

He nods. “Engineering,” he confirms, takes another sip of his champagne only to find the glass empty. Damn it. He puts it on an end table, stalks around a conveniently placed sofa until there’s distance between them. Physical distance, at least. Emotionally, there’s never been enough space between them for the light to shine through. Even now, Erik looks at Charles and _knows_. His every nuance, every emotion and thought and want.

And it makes him angry because Charles is happy to see him, is hurt and a bit disappointed, but not angry, not resentful as he should be. Charles should hate him, but he doesn’t.

Seven years, Erik guesses, is a long time. He looks up at his former lover, finds him smiling and smiles back, like the reflex of a baby. Charles has always been able to make him do that, make him smile for no reason.

“I’m glad you…”

“Fixed the cock-up I made of my life and got a degree?” Erik finishes for the other man, caustically and dry.

Charles doesn’t blush at the blasphemy the way he once would have.

Seven years is a long time. He must say it out loud this time, because Charles nods, says, “Yes.”

“It took a while,” Erik finds himself confessing, almost against his will, but it’s so easy with Charles. It always was. “But eventually I got the kick in the ass I needed to move on.” He looks away. “She would have wanted me to,” he adds, more quietly.

What she would have wanted, actually, was to beat him until he was stupid for messing up the way he had. Erik had been twenty and in love when his mother had been shot in an attempted robbery and he’d gone a bit insane. When the police had failed, time and again, to make any progress, he’d taken finding his mother’s killer into his own hands and in the process, become obsessed.

He’d dropped out of school, alienated his friends, hurt Charles time and again and eventually ended up on drugs in the seediest parts New York had to offer a young, desperate, fuck-up of a man. Erik was never what you would call well balanced and his mother’s death…

She’d been all he’s had, growing up. All he’d ever had until Charles. And Charles. God, he still cringes when he remembers how he treated the other man, how he kept slamming doors in his face and screaming whenever he tried to help. How he kept making Charles hurt and didn’t even care. Until, one day, he’d woken up to find all of Charles’s things gone from their apartment. Even then, he hadn’t cared. Not yet. Just one less obstacle between him and his mother’s killer, him and revenge. Charles’s leaving hadn’t really registered, not on any level that mattered. The other man had threatened to leave before, when all other weapons had failed. Erik had always told him to just fucking go.

“What happened?” Charles asks, in the here and now and Erik wants nothing more than to hold him close and apologize until he turns blue in the face.

Instead he tries a smile, fails, says anyway, “I woke up one morning, six months after you left and realized that you were _gone_.”

He should explain. Would have to, with anyone else. That moment of ice-cold clarity when he’d woken bleary-eyed and hung over and reached out to a spot in the bed that had been cold for months. He’d sat up, surprised, scared, worried, and looked around and realized that his life was _empty_.

He’d fled town less than twenty-four hours later, leaving nothing behind but an empty two-room apartment and a hastily scrawled note for Emma, the only person who’d been able to stand him this far into his descent. And by ‘stand’ he means ‘not murder him on sight’.

He didn’t stop running until he got to California.

Charles makes a noise that sounds like relief, hugs himself and confesses, “I was so worried, so scared that you would do something stupid and get killed because I walked out on you, because I wasn’t strong enough to…”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Erik cuts him off. Charles always blames himself for everything. “You stuck with me longer than you should have and, Charles, I am so, so sorry for what I did to you. For… how I was.”

Infuriatingly, he just gets waved off. “You were in a bad place, my friend.”

He grinds his teeth. _My friend_. He has always hated that antiquated, horrible term of endearment because it always seemed so much less than what they really were. He guesses he should be glad he’s getting this much now, but, God, he _wants_.

Always has. He’s a greedy fuck and he knows it.

Seven years, when compared against the decade they knew each other before then, don’t seem long after all.

“But I forgive you anyway,” Charles tags on, reading the set of his jaw. It’s gratifying, to know Charles still reads Erik as well as Erik reads him.

Maybe…

“So, what are you doing now? Teaching, as you planned?”

He’s asked Emma a million times, but she always refuses to tell, saying he can either figure it out himself or die stupid. It’s her version of caring, he guesses.

Charles nods, an eager look taking over his face. “Yes. Not university, though. I teach at a high school, Erik, and you should see my students. They’re _amazing._ ”

“High school teacher,” he muses. “It fits you. Better than college professor would have.”

He gets a smile as a reward. “I know. It used to be my big dream, but eventually I realized I’d rather teach teenagers than adults. And…” he spreads his hands, palms up, fingers out. “people change.”

“Do they?” Erik murmurs, without meaning to. This time, Charles does blush.

“Are you… seeing anyone?” he asks and Erik ducks his head.

“No.” Because he’s stupid enough to still be hung up on the best thing that ever happened to him seven years after he lost what small right he ever had to it.

Charles hums. “Me either,” he confesses.

Erik’s head jerks up, staring, wide-eyed. “Are you saying…?”

Charles shrugs, shakes his head, nods, shrugs again. Finally he buries his hands in his pants – which match his shirt, obviously picked out by his sister, Erik smiles briefly at that thought – and says, “You hurt me Erik. And I… I already told you that I do not blame you, and that I forgive you, but I…”

“You don’t know me anymore,” Erik pitches in. “And I don’t know you anymore.”

It’s a blatant lie and they both know it. They do know each other, deep down, on a level that frightens them both, always has. The one thing in his life Erik has never had to think about is Charles, because he _knows_ Charles. And Charles knows him. Seven years can no more change that than seventy could.

“Coffee?” he asks before he can talk himself out of it.

Charles nods, too eagerly. Then they just stare at each other, until, flustered, Charles starts digging through his pockets. “I should just give you my number. Or… my address and then you can… Mornings aren’t good, of course, because I have work, but afternoons…when do you work?”

He looks up at Erik, wide-eyed, and it’s absolutely ridiculous, how they’re suddenly nervous around each other, how all the demons Erik always thought would be there _aren’t_ and it feels… it feels like they can just pick up where they left off and make it better, get back to the dreams they used to dream _together_ instead of apart and, God, that scares him.

It scares him because it doesn’t scare him.

“How about,” he asks instead or answering, “right now?”

It comes out like a teenager asking a girl on his first date. Christ, but the things Charles still does to him.

Only Charles nods, madly bobbing his head and sticking his phone back in his pocket before holding out his hand. Erik rounds the sofa and takes it before he can think about it. “I never could stand these parties,” Charles confesses as they sneak out of the room and toward the front door.

“Yeah,” Erik agrees. They grin at each other like they did when they were sixteen and fled Charles’s mother’s birthday party to get drunk on her best wine in Charles’s room and make out all night.

They’re halfway to the door when both their phones get off. The text is from Emma, of course, and simply reads, _You will repay me with jewelry and shoes. Idiots._

They laugh out loud at the same time, making an elderly lady next to them jump, and then, in silent agreement, detour to find Emma leaning against a far wall, looking smug. She gets a peck on the cheek from each of them and a tight hug from Charles, which she tolerates graciously.

She shoos them away with flapping hands and they go, laughing, holding hands again. They’re moving too fast, Erik thinks.

But really, they’re just making up for lost time, aren’t they? And seven years is a lot to make up for, so…

He tugs on Charles’s hand, making him walk faster.

They may or may not skip coffee entirely.

+


End file.
